Learning from your mistakes: The usefulness of scientific ‘false views'

Apparently, the academic study of the history of religion(s) has finally returned to Darwin’s original intuitions in terms of both methodology and epistemology. Some crucial points may still be a matter of contention and discussion, such as the hypothetical derivation of the main contents of worldwide mythologies from a single, prehistoric, African source and spread in subsequent waves via human migrations (Witzel 2012; cf.

false facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

Darwin 1871,2: 385

Indeed, the knowledge of the various ‘false views’ of the ‘founding fathers’ of the HoR (e.g. the obsessive focus on religious similarities identified as historically homological) might also open new paths or suggest interesting reflections and reanalysis. As historian of science Paolo Rossi (1923-2012) has remarked, the (hi)story of scientific blunders ‘is not less relevant, and certainly not less interesting to study, than the statements and discoveries about [scientific] truth’ (Rossi 2003: 79). Hypotheses are not accumulated haphazardly in the footnotes of the discipline like a ‘neighborhood garage sale’ (McCauley 2011: 163), but are assessed, evaluated and eventually welcomed or rejected. And the same applies to both old and new hypothesis and proposals. Two examples of early scientific attempts to update the HoR, which have been falsified by ongoing research, might be useful here: Culianu’s cognitive study of religion and J. Z. Smith’s proposal of a cultural phenetics.

By the very end of the 1980s, Culianu was well aware that the times were changing. As he acutely commented in a book review published in 1990, ‘a unified discipline which would study religion in its context and historical development, but also in its systemic dimension', would necessarily entail a shift from the Chicago phenomenological school to the ‘cognitive aspects of the Humanities. If such synthesis fails to be realized [...] Religionswissenschaft will perish' (Culianu 1990b: 136). In other words, the entire fate of the comparative HoR depended on a radical scientific update. However, Culianu's own attempts were marred by a confused juxtaposition of far too many topics. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Culianu identified two promising main areas of inter­disciplinary research, i.e. (1) ethology and primatology, and (2) morphology and cognition. Now, area (1) represented the most auspicious interdisciplinary breakthrough at that time, but the heuristic value of Culianu's later speculations as exemplified by point (2) was diminished by a misplaced overconfidence in mathematical Platonism, unnecessary cross-disciplinary complications, epistemological naivety and a penchant for what today would amount to quantum quackery (on cognitive and mathematical shortcomings, see Ambasciano 2014: 167-3; David 2015; Pigliucci 2015b; cf. Mezei 2014; for a sympathetic reading of Culianu's scientific blunders, see Kripal 2014: 374-6).

With regard to J. Z. Smith's interest in numerical taxonomy, his model of preference soon showed its limitations. While pheneticists claimed that their model was objective, repeatable and testable, their approach relied on three a priori assumptions: first, phenetic analysis was almost entirely methodologically dependent on ‘which mathematical tools one employs', especially when there is ‘no objective, theory-free way to choose which algorithm to use' (Hamilton and Wheeler 2008: 335); second, despite the presence of statistical tools, phenograms are synchronic accounts of affinity between taxa, without historical depth; third, according to its opponents, phenetics suffered from a confirmationist approach incapable of discriminating between homologies and analogies, i.e. respectively, traits inherited from common descent or traits independently developed due to similar historical constraints (cf. Rieppel 2008; see Hull 1988). As S. J. Gould summarized, the main problem is that, without historical data, ‘morphology is not the best source of data for unraveling history' (Gould 1986: 68). Morphology deceives: crocodiles are more closely related to birds than snakes; sharks, tunas, ichthyosaurs and dolphins share a superficially similar, hydrodynamic body plan because of convergent evolution in a similar environment but they are all distantly related (e.g.

Cladistics relied on: (a) differently weighted characters according to their historical states (i.e. derived, or more recent; primitive, or more ancient); (b) the acknowledgement that taxa branch and modify through time and space, being derived from a common ancestor; (c) the separation between homologies and analogies, with homologies further subdivided into synapomorphies, i.e. recent and informative, and symplesiomorphies, i.e. primitive and uninformative (Hennig 1966; cf. Saler 2000: ISO- 96). Finally, in a time when taxonomy was accused of bordering on pseudoscientific status, cladistics implemented a hypothetico-deductive falsificationism as its modus operandi, conferring renewed dignity to the sub-field (but cf. Rieppel 2008; on the history of taxonomy, see Hull 1988). Today, cladistics has been successfully adopted to study cultural evolution (cf. Mesoudi 2011: 86-94). It is very likely that Smith's passion for agrostology might have misled him in his attempt to transfer this particular taxonomic model to historiography and cultural studies, for phenetics has been able to resist for a long time within the niche of grass evolution and domestication while it failed to recover homological patterns in angiosperm variation and was substituted by cladistics elsewhere in natural sciences (Chapman 1992; Stuessy 2009: 72; for conflicting topologies in plant taxonomy, cf. Mishler 2000). In hindsight, grass was not a good tool to think with insofar as culture and religion were concerned, and this might even be the main cause of the unanswered theoretical issues left by Smith (Strenski 2016).

This brief digression should be enough to show that it is necessary to know the (hi)story of scientific blunders, the Darwinian ‘false views', because if you know the crooked paths pursued with good intentions but which essentially led to nowhere, you are able to avoid them and take the right shortcuts. However, if we put post-Eliadean HoR aside for a moment and focus instead on the whole history of the twentieth­century phenomenological and morphological HoR, we may notice a different sort of pattern altogether.